Researching International Politics: Quantitative Methods

This course introduces students of international relations and security studies to political research methods and specifically to their quantitative branch. Given the key role data analysis enjoys in political research and practice, and given how prominently data-analytical skills are demanded in jobs in politics and beyond, the course serves an important role in the development of students’ competences. Students will learn how to create or collect quantitative political data and how to use them to solve practical and theoretical political problems. The classes cover a range of topics from research design principles to data collection and visualization, probability and inference, descriptive statistics, and a series of inferential statistical techniques. Each class discusses the core tenets of the issues covered, but it also introduces more advanced material and insights from the practice of applied political research. Some specialty topics in most recent quantitative methods advances, such as natural language processing, are also touched upon. The class does not assume any prior knowledge of statistics but it does assume a good deal of motivation on the part of students, as the learning curve may be somewhat steeper for some. The powerful free statistical package R will be used in the class, in combination with RStudio. Students thus also acquire practical transferable coding (programming) skills.